“They’re going through a phase, then, of not getting along,” he says, refusing to cede ground. “What are you doing?”

“I’m reading the latest news account.” She’s silent for a minute, studying the screen. “No arrests, no suspects. They released her name.”

They are both silent then. Thinking of Danielle.

“Everyone on the neighborhood Faceplace page is freaking out,” she said.

“Murder does that,” Kyle said.

“Some dads and moms are talking of forming a neighborhood patrol where they are just going to walk around at night like they’re a security team. People are posting that they’ve spotted strangers in the greenbelt. A group wants to put up cameras everywhere. Another group wants to turn us into a gated community, and the Carter girl said someone tried to open their back door early this morning.”

“They’ll find who did it,” he says quietly. Then he adds, not looking at her: “Why do you think Danielle was in the park at that hour?”

“Went for a walk, maybe.”

“That early? Because she’d been dead for a while, right?”

“How do you know that?”

“I don’t. I’m just guessing. You said her wrist was cold.”

Iris doesn’t answer.

“I mean, it’s not like it’s Zilker Park or Pease Park,” he said, referring to two large public parks in Austin. “This is in our quiet little neighborhood.”

“I think,” Iris said, “she went for a walk, and there was someone there doing something they shouldn’t be, maybe kids from another neighborhood—you know they’ve had problems with that—or someone who came into the park from the greenbelt, and maybe Danielle confronted them or she saw them smoking dope and they killed her.”

“For smoking dope,” he says in a flat voice.

“Well, I don’t know, doing something worse, then.” She isn’t looking at him. “No one could have wanted her dead.” But now she glances back at him as she sits on the edge of the bed.

“It’s weird,” he says, “when someone does something unexplained. Like going for a walk in the park at five o’clock in the morning, or whenever she did.”

“You were very late coming to bed last night.” There. She says it. Now their gazes meet.

“Is that a problem?” he asks. “I told you why when you woke up as I got into bed. I was working. I couldn’t sleep.”

“Did you see her walk by your office window?” His upstairs study faces out onto the street; if Danielle walked to the park, he might have spotted her. She might have looked at his study window, being the one light on in any of the houses along the road. She could imagine Danielle walking, head down, intent. She had been an intense woman. Walking toward her doom.

“No,” he says, but he waits ten seconds to say it. “If I had, I would have told the police.”